Photos of serial killer Robert Pickton victims Diane Rock, left, and Cara Ellis are displayed during a news conference with family members of Pickton’s victims in Vancouver, B.C., on March 29, 2012. (Darryl Dyck/CP)

WINNIPEG — A RCMP report says aboriginal women have been much more prone to violent death than non-natives, but police have solved cases involving both groups at virtually the same rate.

The 22-page report into murdered and missing aboriginal women paints a dark picture of poverty, unemployment and other factors that the Mounties say require a response from all Canadians.

“We still have a lot of unanswered questions … but I think this research project, this operational overview, is an excellent first step in that direction from a policing community,” Janice Armstrong, the RCMP’s deputy commissioner for contract and aboriginal policing, said at a Winnipeg news conference Friday.

“It’s my hope … that it will contribute to that larger Canadian conversation.”

Frances Chartrand with the Manitoba Metis Federation said the report requires concrete action, including more services for women, in communities across the country.

“What’s going to the grassroots? We need programs and services at the local level,” she said.

The report, a detailed statistical breakdown of 1,181 cases since 1980, says aboriginal women make up 4.3 per cent of the Canadian population, yet account for 16 per cent of female homicides and 11.3 per cent of missing women.

It says aboriginal women are more likely to be killed by an acquaintance and are less likely to be killed by a spouse. They are also more likely to be killed by someone with a criminal record (71 per cent versus 45 per cent) and someone on social assistance (24 per cent versus 10 per cent).

The RCMP also say murdered aboriginal women were more likely to have a criminal record, to be unemployed and were much more likely to have consumed intoxicants just before their deaths (63 per cent versus 20 per cent).

“It’s by no means on our part to accord any type of blame to the victim … but the reality is that there are difficult social and economic circumstances that need to be considered and need to be discussed as we move forward,” said Supt. Tyler Bates, RCMP director of national aboriginal policing.

The report indicates a small minority of missing and murdered aboriginal women had been involved in the sex trade — 12 per cent versus five per cent among non-native women.

It also challenges accusations from some quarters that aboriginal deaths are not taken as seriously by police. The “solve” rates are almost identical at 88 per cent for aboriginal women and 89 per cent for others.

The Mounties say they are sharing the data with other police forces, which have jurisdiction for roughly half of the unsolved cases, and have directed their own divisions to review any outstanding matters.

They are also promising to add resources to investigative units where needed.

The report appeared to do little to quell calls for a national inquiry and prompted more debate in the House of Commons.

“Conservative policies and programs are not working, so will they finally listen to the families and to Canadians across the country and call for a national public inquiry?” New Democrat MP Nycole Turmel asked in question period Friday.

“Now is the time to take action, not to continue to study the issue,” Bob Dechert, parliamentary secretary for justice, responded. He pointed to recent funding increases to fight domestic violence.

James Anaya, a United Nations official who spent nine days in Canada last year studying aboriginal issues, said earlier this week that an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls is still necessary.

Earlier this month, Metis actor and singer Tom Jackson added his voice to calls for an inquest.

Photos of serial killer Robert Pickton victims Diane Rock, left, and Cara Ellis are displayed as British Columbia NDP leader Adrian Dix, right, speaks during a news conference with family members of Pickton's victims in Vancouver, B.C., on March 29, 2012. (Darryl Dyck/CP)

VANCOUVER – Bias against the poor, drug-addicted sex workers in Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside led to a series of failures that allowed serial killer Robert Pickton to spend years hunting his victims unimpeded by police, a public inquiry has found.

Commissioner Wally Oppal’s 1,448-page final report, released Monday, chronicles years of mistakes that allowed Pickton to lure dozens of women to his farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C., with little interference from police and even less concern from the public.

He noted that even referring to Pickton’s victims as missing women is a misnomer.

“The women didn’t go missing. They aren’t just absent, they didn’t just go away. They were taken.”

In a news conference interrupted by applause, jeers, drumming and aboriginal singing, Oppal appealed to the general public, asking people to imagine what life was like for Pickton’s victims and other women like them, even before they crossed paths with Pickton.

He said they were treated — in life and in death — as nobodies.

“I ask you to imagine how you would feel, put yourself in the shoes of one of the missing and murdered women and think how it would feel if you were dismissed, considered unworthy of attention by the majority of the people in your city.

“What if you were made to feel invisible, unworthy?”

Oppal’s report found the problems with the investigation included structural ones — poor co-operation between Vancouver police and the RCMP, for example. But many were a result of something far more insidious and difficult to cure.

“Would the response of the Vancouver police and the public have been any different if these women had come from the west side of town? I think the answer is clear,” Oppal told The Canadian Press in an interview discussing his report’s conclusions.

“There was an institutional, systemic bias against the women. … They were poor, they were aboriginal, they were drug addicted and they were not taken seriously.”

Those biases were compounded by a lack of leadership among Vancouver police and the RCMP, he said.

Still, Oppal concluded the effects of that bias were not intentional, leading to systemic failures rather than a conscious decision to ignore Vancouver’s missing women.

Oppal spent eight months hearing evidence about the failed investigations by the Vancouver police and the Port Coquitlam RCMP into reports of missing sex workers and evidence that Pickton was a suspect.

The result is a highly critical document that describes parallel yet largely separate investigations that were each plagued by indifference and poor police work.

Oppal made 63 recommendations, including a regional police force for the greater Vancouver region, immediate improvements to services for sex workers, changes to police policies to ensure they reflect the needs of the impoverished women in the Downtown Eastside and more services for sex workers and other vulnerable women.

He also said the B.C. government should appoint an aboriginal elder to oversee the implementation of his recommendations and to help draft formal apologies to begin a reconciliation process with families and the community. And he recommended the province set up a compensation fund for families of missing and murdered women.

But it’s not clear whether Oppal’s report will satisfy his many critics, including relatives of missing and murdered women and numerous advocacy groups, which have denounced the inquiry as a flawed process that ignored the voices of the women it was created to protect and put too much emphasis on police.

There were reports of missing women in Vancouver dating back to the 1980s, and those disappearances increased dramatically in the mid-1990s.

When relatives and friends attempted to report those women missing, officers and staff with the Vancouver police department told them the women were transient drug addicts who weren’t in any trouble or were simply on vacation, Oppal’s report noted, referring back to testimony from families at the inquiry.

The first major investigative blunders began in 1997, when Pickton attacked a sex worker at his farm, leaving her with injuries so severe that she died twice on the operating table. Pickton was charged with attempted murder, but prosecutors eventually stayed the case, after which 19 more women later connected to Pickton’s farm disappeared.

Following the attack, police seized clothing and other material from Pickton’s property, which, when tested following his arrest in 2002, revealed the DNA of two missing sex workers.

Among the many mistakes by police, Oppal’s report counted the failure to test that evidence or follow up with additional interviews with the victim, who told officers after her attack that she believed other sex workers had been to Pickton’s property.

Oppal also said the fact that Pickton had been accused of trying to kill a sex worker in 1997 should have served as a massive red flag for investigators later, especially when several informants implicated Pickton in the disappearances of other women from the Downtown Eastside.

“That began a litany of failures,” Oppal said in the interview. “The investigations of missing and murdered women in the province of B.C. was subject to colossal police failures.”

Those failures quickly multiplied.

Oppal’s report noted that senior officials within the Vancouver police were reluctant to accept the possibility a serial killer was at work in the city, dismissing evidence from their own officers, including geographic profiler Kim Rossmo, who floated the theory in 1998. The department handed the investigation to a single officer who joined the force’s missing person unit with no homicide experience and no support from her bosses.

In Port Coquitlam, RCMP officers allowed their investigation to lay dormant for months at a time, and when they did work on the file, that work was riddled with errors.

When Mounties attempted to talk to Pickton in late 1999, they granted his brother’s request to wait until the rainy season when he wouldn’t be so busy on the farm. Eventually, Pickton was interviewed, but it was poorly handled by officers without any interrogation training.

The Mounties and Vancouver police started an RCMP-led missing women task force in 2001, but its investigators operated under the mistaken belief that women were no longer disappearing.

Vancouver police and the RCMP have issued public apologies for not doing enough to stop Pickton, and the Vancouver police conducted a self-critical internal review that was made public.

However, both tempered those apologies by insisting officers they did the best they could with the information they had, and both have spent considerable time blaming each other.

That amounted to “unseemly finger-pointing,” said Oppal. “It took place in the inquiry.”

Oppal’s recommendations include a regional police force for greater Vancouver — an area with several municipal forces and RCMP detachments that operate independently from one another. B.C. recently signed a 20-year deal with the Mounties, as did the municipalities that use the RCMP as their local police force.

He called for more services for sex workers and other vulnerable women, including immediate funding for a 24-hour drop-in centre in the Downtown Eastside for sex workers and a transportation service for women and girls who would otherwise resort to hitchhiking along the so-called Highway of Tears in the province’s north.

The recommendations included changes to missing person policies used by police, new training for officers and creating “equality audits” to measure police forces’ policies for protecting sex workers and vulnerable women.

He also called for changes to policies used by Crown counsel in cases that include vulnerable women, particularly those involving vulnerable women as witnesses.

Oppal’s inquiry, which wrapped up formal hearings in June, faced intense criticism from its inception.

His opponents were many, including the families of missing women and many non-profit groups that work with and advocate for sex workers and drug addicts in the Downtown Eastside.

A long list of groups boycotted the hearings after the provincial government refused to give them funding to hire lawyers.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/bias-against-picktons-victims-led-to-police-failures-indifference-inquiry/feed/0Report into why police failed to catch Robert Pickton to be releasedhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/report-into-why-police-failed-to-catch-robert-pickton-to-be-released/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/report-into-why-police-failed-to-catch-robert-pickton-to-be-released/#respondMon, 17 Dec 2012 14:59:19 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=329362What happened, who's to blame and what must be done

A photograph of Summer "CJ" Morningstar Fowler, of the Gitanmaax First Nation near Hazelton, B.C., is displayed as her mother Matilda Fowler weeps during a news conference in Vancouver, B.C., on Dec. 12, 2012. (Darryl Dyck/CP)

VANCOUVER – Families who lost daughters, mothers and sisters to serial killer Robert Pickton have long known police failed them as the former pig farmer hunted for victims in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and lured them back to his property.

But a lengthy public inquiry report to be released today will attempt to answer the more difficult question of why two police forces were unable — or unwilling — to connect the dots that led from missing sex workers in Vancouver to a farm in nearby Port Coquitlam, B.C.

Inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal is scheduled to release his final report on how Vancouver police and the RCMP responded to reports of missing women and why it took them so long to finally stop Pickton, who was arrested in February 2002 — several years after investigators first received tips implicating him.

Oppal’s 1,448-page report is expected to outline what happened, who’s to blame and, more importantly, what must be done to prevent the same thing from happening again.

Ernie Crey, whose sister Dawn Crey’s DNA was found on Pickton’s farm, said he’s optimistic Oppal’s report will offer meaningful recommendations to make the system better for women like his sister, who suffered from mental illness and turned to prostitution to fuel her drug addiction.

“What I’m expecting to see is a lengthy, unblinking, hard-hitting report with some very strong recommendations on how policing might be improved in this province, such that if a Pickton-like character ever emerges in the future — God forbid — that he’s in the clutches of the police far earlier,” Crey said in an interview.

The inquiry heard from 80 witnesses between October 2011 and June of this year, including relatives of Pickton’s victims, current and former police officers and Crown prosecutors, each offering their own stories and their own recommendations to fix the system.

Oppal also heard from fierce critics, both from outside and inside the hearing room, who denounced the process as flawed and unable to uncover the systemic problems that led Pickton’s victims into the sex trade in the first place and prevented police from doing more to protect them.

Critics included advocacy groups that boycotted the hearings after the provincial government denied them legal funding, as well as lawyers for families of missing and murdered women who had standing at the inquiry.

Crey offered his own, measured criticisms as the inquiry unfolded, and he’s still concerned Oppal’s report won’t focus enough on the underlying problems affecting vulnerable sex workers, many of them, like his sister, aboriginal. He notes the inquiry’s terms of reference were heavily focused on examining the actions of police.

Still, Crey prefers to see Oppal’s report as a step toward change, not the final answer.

“I would be pleasantly surprised if he went further than his terms of reference and made observations and comments about the social circumstances of the women, their lives in the Downtown Eastside, and how things might be improved there, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen,” he said.

“But I’m not saying that once this report is in, that’s where it all ends. That’s not where I’m going to end my campaign to make things different for people like my sister. They’re not going to hear less from me, they are going to hear more. It’s only the beginning for me.”

The report will be released at a news conference in Vancouver, a short walk from the blighted streets of the Downtown Eastside where Pickton found his victims more than a decade ago.

The women’s families will be given four hours to read the report before it is released to the public at 1 p.m. PT, and Oppal discusses its contents. His presentation will be streamed live on the Internet.

He will be followed by Justice Minister Shirley Bond, who will outline the province’s initial response to Oppal’s recommendations.

Oppal has said little publicly about what might be in his final report, but his recommendations will likely focus on how police should investigate major cases that spread across jurisdictions, particularly those involving serial killers and sex workers.

He told a policy forum connected to the inquiry earlier this year that he’ll likely recommend improvements to services in the Downtown Eastside, including a drop-in centre for survival sex workers, which he described as a “no-brainer.”

Vancouver police and the RCMP offered apologies at the inquiry, but they also blamed each other. Vancouver police said the RCMP dropped the ball as Mounties in Port Coquitlam investigated Pickton. The RCMP said the Vancouver police failed to notice a serial killer was operating in their city.

Police received the first tips about Pickton’s involvement in the murder of Downtown Eastside sex workers in 1998, but he wasn’t arrested until February 2002, when RCMP officers armed with a search warrant related to illegal firearms raided his farm.

He was subsequently convicted of six counts of second-degree murder, though the remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his farm. He once told an undercover police officer that he killed 49 women.

]]>VANCOUVER – The closest thing Marilyn Renter has ever had to a trial for her step-daughter’s death is the public inquiry into the failures that allowed a serial killer to target sex workers from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Robert Pickton was charged with murdering Cindy Feliks, who vanished in 1997 and whose DNA was found five years later on the former pig farmer’s sprawling property in nearby Port Coquitlam, B.C.

But once Pickton was convicted of killing six sex workers and sentenced to life in prison, prosecutors had little appetite for putting him back on trial for 20 additional murder charges involving Feliks and other women whose remains or DNA were found on the farm.

“For a lot of us, there have only been six girls that have actually had justice done to them,” Renter said in an interview.

“We haven’t had justice for our girls, and if it has to come in this forum, then so be it,” she added, referring to the public inquiry.

On Monday, Renter will find out whether her long wait for justice has been answered as Commissioner Wally Oppal releases a 1,448-page report outlining why Pickton wasn’t caught sooner and what should be done to prevent similar failures in the future.

For eight months, the inquiry heard from 80 witnesses, including current and former police officers, Crown prosecutors, sex workers, academics and the families of missing women.

Renter told the inquiry that Feliks, a 42-year-old mother who was born in Detroit before moving to the Vancouver area as a child, vanished in November 1997.

She was addicted to drugs — “I think all of them,” Renter recalled in the witness box — and supporting her habit with prostitution.

In what became a familiar story, Renter testified that Feliks’s younger sister tried, unsuccessfully, to report the disappearance to police in 1997 and again the following year. A formal missing person file wasn’t opened until 2001.

Renter blames the delay on police attitudes toward women, sex workers and drug addicts. She hopes Oppal’s report can find a way to change that.

“They’ve got to get rid of a lot of attitude,” said Renter, who was living in Calgary when her step-daughter disappeared but moved to Rosedale, B.C., two years ago.

The inquiry was called to examine why Vancouver police and the RCMP failed to catch Pickton before he was arrested in February 2002, despite evidence that surfaced years earlier linking him to the disappearance of Vancouver sex workers.

Oppal was also asked to look into Crown counsel’s decision not to prosecute Pickton for attempted murder following a vicious attack on a sex worker in 1997. After that charge was stayed, 19 more women connected to Pickton’s farm disappeared.

The inquiry heard that senior officers in Vancouver actively resisted considering the possibility that a serial killer was operating in their city, while RCMP investigators in Port Coquitlam were slow to seriously investigate Pickton.

Oppal said the problems that plagued those investigations must be fixed, because just as Pickton wasn’t Canada’s first serial killer, he won’t be the last.

“Pickton isn’t the sole problem — there will be other serial killers,” Oppal said in an interview in advance of the report’s release.

“Horrible tragedies have taken place here, and we need to learn from those tragedies. We have to come together as a community so that women are better protected.”

Bringing the community together, particularly the non-profit groups that work with sex workers in the Downtown Eastside, has perhaps been Oppal’s largest challenge.

The provincial government’s decision to deny legal funding for advocacy groups that had been granted standing at the inquiry prompted nearly all of them to boycott the process.

Several of those groups held a news conference last month denouncing Oppal’s report and the entire inquiry, which they say was too narrowly focused on police and failed to give adequate voice to the vulnerable women it was set up to protect.

Oppal again pleaded for his critics to read his report with an open mind.

“I’m urging those people who have had differences with the inquiry to come forward and co-operate,” he said.

“The violence against women and the tragedies that we have experienced in our communities are far more important than the individual differences about the process of the inquiry.”

Unlike the advocacy groups, the families of missing and murdered women received government funding to hire lawyers at the inquiry, but they, too, have decried the process as deeply flawed.

One of their lawyers, Neil Chantler, said the inquiry didn’t hear enough evidence about systemic problems within the police forces, including allegations of sexism and racism, to determine what really allowed Pickton to remain at large.

“The primary theme we’re going to be looking for is some recognition that institutional prejudices were pervasive at the time,” said Chantler, who along with lawyer Cameron Ward represented more than two dozen families.

“This commission shied away from those issues during the hearing process and chose to focus on other issues such as technical policing failures rather than the more social, systemic issues that might have been at play.”

Vancouver police and the RCMP have each offered apologies, but with disclaimers attached.

Both forces admitted they didn’t do enough to catch Pickton, while insisting their officers did the best they could with the information they had.They also spent considerable time blaming each other, with the RCMP accusing Vancouver police of failing to notice a serial killer was at work and the Vancouver police blaming the RCMP in Port Coquitlam for botching the investigation.

Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his farm. He once told an undercover police officer that he killed 49 women.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-wasnt-robert-pickton-caught-sooner/feed/0The Missing Women inquiry is another in a series of costly train wreckshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/the-missing-woman-inquiry-is-another-in-a-series-of-costly-train-wrecks/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/the-missing-woman-inquiry-is-another-in-a-series-of-costly-train-wrecks/#commentsFri, 13 Apr 2012 16:06:05 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=252246Ottawa has spent nearly $200 million on seven inquiries. So, are we getting our money's worth?

The train wreck of the Missing Women inquiry in Vancouver once again raises the question of whether this process—in the words of former Supreme Court justice Willard Estey—has been “abused beyond usefulness.” Estey spoke those words in the mid-1990s, after the federal government shut down the inquiry into actions of Canadian soldiers in Somalia.

Yet the appetite for this unique blend of justice and theatre lives on. Democracy Watch, the Ottawa-based government accountability group, maintains on its website a list of 18 “questionable situations” in federal affairs, whose only remedy, they say, are public inquiries.

One hates to differ with organizations dedicated to accountability. They’re so rare. But a quick calculation reveals that Ottawa has spent nearly $200 million on seven inquiries of national import, dating back to the early 1990s:

• Somalia, $25 million

• Tainted blood, $15 million

• Arar, $27 million

• Air India, $30 million

• Dziekanski, $4.5 million

• Schreiber-Mulroney, $16 million

• Gomery, (take a breath) $80 million

This total does not include compensation for victims. In some cases, it does not include legal costs incurred to the taxpayer such as counsel for impugned public officials.

Nor does it include the cost policy-based royal commissions like the $15-million Romanow Report on health care, or provincial ones like the inquiry into sexual abuse in Cornwall, Ont., whose $53 million price tag forced the Ontario government to rethink its entire inquiry process (Dziekanski was called by provincial authorities, yet involved federal agencies like the RCMP and border services).

So. Are we getting our money’s worth?

In a few cases, like the Krever inquiry into tainted blood and Arar, the cost seems bearable, if not a bargain. Victims and their families get their say. Meaningful change stands in plain view. From time to time, heads roll.

In others, not so much. Anyone who figured the Gomery Inquiry would send a jolt of rectitude through political circles has long since been set straight by the “in-out” scandal, or the Harper government’s G20 spending extravaganza.

Moreover, these days, internal controversy or questions of fairness tend to overshadow an inquiry’s road map to reform. Yes, there’s always a vague hope that the exercise will serve as a warning to the negligent and venal in the future. But as the Missing Women case illustrates, that hope is fragile. From this point on, the inquiry led by Wally Oppal is itself on probation. Its next lapse might well condemn it to irrelevance.

That’s not to throw the whole model overboard. Like democracy, it’s the worst system except for all the others. Still, with public dollars in short supply, it could use fixes—greater reliance on reports rather than testimony; less reliance on lawyers; limits on legal fees.

Governments, meanwhile, would do well to ponder before commissioning their next set of proceedings: under what circumstances do inquiries materially change the behaviour of individuals and institutions? Do those circumstances apply in the case at hand? Is the matter best left to the courts?

Last but not least, do you, as a government, really need a specially commissioned judge to tell you to do the right thing?